


Cherry Red

by reeseseiley



Category: Waterparks (Band)
Genre: Awsten + Travis' Slumber Party Podcast Submission, Murder, Other, Paranormal, Witchcraft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-05
Updated: 2020-10-05
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:55:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26827726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reeseseiley/pseuds/reeseseiley
Summary: Travis has begged Awsten for months to play bass in Waterparks. Travis finally snaps, which sends him down a spiral of hauntings from the singer.
Kudos: 3





	Cherry Red

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! This fic has no sexual content because I wanted to give the boys a break for once if they happen to read it on the show. 
> 
> Awsten and Travis, if you're reading this, I hope you enjoy it. It took me five months to write because I kept getting distracted.

Travis has asked Awsten relentlessly to be in the band for months now. He gets rejected every single time without fail. Tonight is the final show of the Fandom Tour in Houston and tonight, Travis decided to ask Awsten one last time.

\---------------------------------------------------

The green-haired boy steps off the stage after finishing his set, looking immediately at Travis, “How did you like the rest of the show? I mean like, after I let you sing.” Awsten laughs. “It was good and all but, I really really liked singing tonight, Awsten.” Travis sighed and looked in his best friend’s eyes. Somehow Travis’s eyes spoke to Awsten and he knew what Travis was about to ask. “Listen, Travis. You can’t be in the band. We’ve already built our brand and there isn’t room for a bass player, let alone another singer. I gave you what you wanted-” Awsten gets cut off by Travis. “For a verse, Awsten! I’m sick of this!”Travis spat out, anger laced in his voice. Travis is filled with a rage that he’s never felt before. His heart starts racing and his stomach starts boiling. His muscles tense as he looks at who used to be his best friend and punches him square in the nose. Awsten immediately falls over onto the ground and clutches his face, “Travis! What the fuc-”. He stops and looks at the man standing above him, clutching a bass guitar with two hands by the neck. This was not his best friend anymore. Awsten didn’t know who this Travis was. “Travis, what are you doing?” Travis lifts the guitar up and slams the body down onto Awsten’s head. Immediately, the singer’s face goes pale and his eyes roll back into his head. Travis kneels down and looks at his dying friend. He’s not sad. He feels satisfied with what he’s done. “Who’s the singer now?”, he whispers to the boy on the floor. Travis’s fingers graze Awsten’s bleeding face. He looks at his hands and fixates at the red liquid coating them. The color fascinates him, as it’s more vibrant than he thought it would be. “Red”, he whispers to himself, “Cherry red.”

\-----------------------------------------------

As Travis drove down the long stretch of highway towards the Galveston Bay, he realized that he had been unexpectedly calm. He was aware that he had just killed his best friend and he was also aware that his best friend was formally rolling around in the trunk of his car, but he was calm. He thinks about how after the show, he had to sneak Awsten’s limp body past a crowd of eager fans and discreetly shove him into the trunk. He thinks about how he ran into Geoff outside the bathroom after cleaning the blood off his hands. He thinks about how Geoff didn’t suspect a thing. Not a single thing. Satisfied with the way he played this entire thing off, Travis chuckles to himself and turns the radio on at a low volume. He drives for another thirty minutes until he spots the lights of an upcoming bridge. Travis has only seen two cars on the entire stretch from downtown to this point, so he decides that the main bridge to the island would be a good enough place to dump the body. Another ten minutes go by until Travis reaches the bridge. As he approaches the top, he begins to slow the car down and pull to the side. Once he’s at the top, Travis puts the car in park and leans back in the driver’s seat, letting out a long sigh. After a couple seconds of gathering up the courage, he finally opens the car door and works his way to the trunk. Travis looks around to make sure that nobody is approaching from either side of the bridge. Once he’s sure the coast is clear, Travis’s arms wrap around the dead singer’s body and he carries the corpse bridal style to the edge of the bridge. Without much thinking, Travis lets go of the boy and watches him fall into the water. Splash.

\------------------------------------------------

Travis lays down in his bed and all of the sudden, he feels the weight of what he had just done. He had just killed his best friend. He just took the life of someone, adored by thousands, just… on a whim. This thought makes Travis’s stomach turn upside down and his heart race. He curls up underneath his bedsheets to try to comfort himself. “Breathe in… two...three…” Travis thinks to himself, “Breathe out...two...three…”. He keeps taking deep breaths to calm himself down until he eventually falls asleep. Travis dreams of singing on stage with Geoff and Otto. He sings the lyrics that his, now late, best friend wrote to the crowd and the crowd sings back. Not only did he replace Awsten but he also plays bass in the band. This was the happiest Travis had felt in years. This is what he had been asking for. This was all he ever wanted. Travis sleeps peacefully for the next hour or so until he’s woken up by a whisper. “Trust me, you’ve earned this” Startled by the sudden noise, Travis rips his bedsheets off of himself and turns on his bedside lamp. He looks around the room and notices nothing out of the ordinary… until his eyes trail up to the ceiling. The words written above him read, “BITCH DOES IT LOOK LIKE I WANT TO EAT CARROTS WITH YOU?”. Travis’s heart drops as he takes in what he had just read. He grabs his phone flashlight to observe the writing up close. That’s when Travis realizes that the message is written in blood… the same cherry red that poured out of Awsten’s face earlier that night. “It’s just a coincidence,” Travis whispers to himself. He takes a deep breath before sitting back down on the bed. “It’s just a coincidence. I’ll clean it off in the morning.” Travis covers himself up again with the sheets and turns off the lamp. As he closes his eyes in an attempt to sleep, Travis swears hears Awsten whisper, “Goodnight.”

\-----------------------------------------------

Travis has trouble sleeping the rest of the night, tossing and turning for hours until the sun finally starts to rise. At around seven A.M., Travis rolls out of bed, thinking about how to clean up the blood on his ceiling. He makes his way to the bathroom to get hydrogen peroxide from the cabinet. As Travis opens the bathroom door, he glances in the mirror. “What the fuck,” Travis mutters to himself. He approaches the mirror until his face is about a foot away from the reflective surface. Travis stares at himself and he begins to focus on the green stars painted over his eyes. “Who did that?”, he whispers as he examines the paint closer. Travis’s fingers graze over the green markings, trying to rub it off, but the markings still remain. Frantically, Travis turns on the sink and pumps soap into his hands. He scrubs his face, focusing around his eyes but still, the stars remain perfectly intact on his skin. “I’ll figure it out later,” Travis huffs as he reaches down into his cabinet and grabs the hydrogen peroxide. He also grabs the spare roll of paper towels and heads back towards his bedroom. Travis sighs, sets the cleaning supplies down on the floor, and walks over to the corner of his room where his record player sits. He sorts through his collection of records and decides to put on The Young and the Hopeless by Good Charlotte. As the needle touches the vinyl, Travis expects the voice of Joel Madden to start playing from the speakers but instead, he’s greeted with the endearing voice of Scatman at full volume. “What?” Travis stops the record and picks it up off of the turntable. He inspects the label closer to make sure he put the right one on. “It says Good Charlotte! Why the fuck is it doing that?” Travis flips the vinyl over, expecting it to play the B-side of the record, but the voice of Scatman John still continues to play loudly from the speakers. In a fit of frustration, Travis picks up the record from the turntable and throws it on the ground, shattering it. He looks at the pieces of broken vinyl scattered across his bedroom carpet and sighs, bending down to pick up the mess he had just made. Once every piece of the album is cleaned up, Travis makes his way over to the bed to start working on the blood that has now dried on the ceiling above it. He sprays the chemical onto the message, dissolving it, scrubbing away the blood with paper towels. Once the writing above him is gone, Travis decides to take a break from cleaning and watch some TV. He makes his way into the living room and grabs the remote from the coffee table, turning on the TV before sitting on the couch. He scrolls through Netflix until he comes across a show that he had been meaning to watch for a while. Awsten had always told Travis to watch it, but he had never gotten around to it. Travis clicks play on The Office. Immediately, Travis is struck with a sense of familiarity listening to the opening theme of the show. He recognized the chords but he couldn’t put his finger on it just yet. That’s when he realized… “Oh shit”, Travis whispers. “There’s nothing in my system so I’m feeling what I feel for you…” The television plays the familiar tune of Not Warriors so loudly that Travis’s ears start to physically hurt. “ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?”, Travis screeches, immediately pressing the power button on the remote to turn the screen off. He takes a deep breath and sinks into his sofa, putting his head into his hands and muttering to himself, “What is going on?”. Travis starts to think about what could possibly be happening. Everything that’s happened today reminds him of the boy he killed. “It’s just a coincidence”, he thinks to himself, his pulse rises with anxiety, “Awsten can’t be doing this. He’s dead.” A sweat starts to break out on his forehead. Travis shakes his head and gets up to get a snack from the kitchen and clear his mind. He walks into the kitchen and grabs an orange. As he is about to start peeling it, he feels a cold hand touch his shoulder. The feeling of the unexpected hand shocked Travis to where he impulsively bites a chunk out of the fruit without peeling it first. “Oh my god, that’s disgusting”, Travis says as he spits the orange out of his mouth and onto the counter. He feels something hit him in the back of the head- then hears the object hit the floor. Travis looks down at the ground and sees an orange sliced perfectly in half. “What the-” he says angrily until he gets cut off by a familiar voice. “TRAVIS.” Travis jumps and looks behind him. His heart drops. “There’s no way”, he thinks as he sees Awsten standing right behind him. “Are you gonna pick that up?” Awsten motions to the orange half on the floor. “W-wha-what are you d-doing here?” stutters Travis as he tries to comprehend that his dead best friend is now standing in his kitchen. “What do you think I’m doing here?”, says Awsten, glancing at the other half of the orange in his hand. “You fucking killed me last night. I’m not going away until I get my revenge.” He looks at Travis and throws the second orange half at him. That’s when Travis notices that even though he was looking at his friend, he could still see the counter behind him. He thinks for a second and the realization hits him. Awsten is a ghost. “W-what do you m-mean?” Travis stutters again. “You’ll see.” Awsten looks Travis up and down before walking up to him and putting a cold hand on his shoulder, “Good luck.” All of the sudden, Awsten vanishes out of thin air, leaving Travis alone in the kitchen. “Awst-”, Travis tries to say but he’s stopped by the ridiculous volume of his own voice. Why did he just screech? Travis tries to whisper, “Wait”, but all that comes out is an ear-piercingly loud squeal that kind of sounds like the word he was attempting to say. In his utter confusion and frustration, Travis sighs and looks down at the ground to notice that he’s not wearing the clothes that he was wearing earlier this morning. Instead, his feet are covered by a soft, fuzzy, gray fabric that connects to the identical fabric on his legs. Travis sticks his arms out and notices that they are also covered by the material. He is in a onesie. Suddenly, Travis remembers the video that his late friend’s band had shot for their song Crave. “Oh no. Am I…” , Travis thinks as he reaches up to his head only to feel the soft plush ears on top of the hood draped over him, “I’m in the dog onesie aren’t I?”. “What kind of a sick game is this?!”, Travis screeches again, almost forgetting that his voice has suddenly changed and that it won’t go back to normal. He starts to panic, wondering what his late friend has in store for him. Travis paces into the living room to find his cell phone. Shaking, he picks up his phone and searches for Geoff’s contact. Before he can click the message button, his phone starts ringing. Coincidentally, the screen is glowing with Geoff’s name. Hesitantly, Travis declines the call, worried that his voice would freak out the man on the other line. Instead of answering, he shoots Geoff a text. “Hey, why’d you call?” A couple seconds go by until Travis receives a text from Geoff that reads, “You looked really upset after the show last night and I was calling to check in on you. Are you doing alright?” Travis thinks about what to say before sending another text, “Something happened between me and Awsten last night and I’m really stressed out about it. Can we meet up to talk?” Another text from Geoff appears on Travis’s phone, “Sure! Do you want to meet at our old spot in an hour?” Travis sighs with relief remembering how secluded their old spot was, “Sure. Be there soon.”

\------------------------------------------------

Travis pulls into the old parking lot behind what used to be a shopping center but is now an abandoned building that hasn't had any life inside for years. Across the lot, he spots Geoff’s car. Before Travis can get over to park next to his friend, Geoff and Otto step out of the car and start walking towards Travis. Travis slows down his car and parks in the middle of the empty lot. He opens the door and starts to make his way towards his friends. As he gets closer to the other two guys, he notices that they look somewhat angry. No, scratch that- really angry. Geoff and Otto march towards Travis and as Travis slows his pace, his heart drops to his stomach when he notices that Otto and Geoff are both holding various objects. In one hand, Otto is holding a bundle of Christmas lights and in the other, a baseball bat with teeth glued onto it. Geoff is holding a butcher’s knife. Once the two men get about ten feet away from Travis, Otto begins to speak, “Travis. We know what you did last night.” Fearfully forgetting that his voice is stuck in a screech, Travis screams, “What do you mean!” Otto slowly walks to Travis, dropping the Christmas lights on the ground on the way there, “We know what you did to Awsten.” He takes the bat and rests it on his shoulder, finally getting about two feet away from the other man. “Trust me,” he whispers, “You earned this.” Otto takes the tooth-bat and swings it at Travis’s side, knocking the wind out of him. The killer collapses onto the ground, clutching his abdomen, and trying to breathe as Otto steps on his back, somehow shoving him to the ground even further. “Geoff get over here”, Otto demands. Geoff slowly jogs over to his friend pinning Travis to the ground. Otto looks up at Geoff and then to the knife, still in Geoff’s hand, “Your turn,” he says, “We have to do this to bring him back.” Geoff sighs, and reluctantly raises the blade, swinging it down onto Travis’s foot, cutting it off in one motion. Travis lets out a yelp and screams, “What the fuck!” Geoff picks up the foot and takes it over to the car that Travis had arrived in. He sets it on the hood. Otto calls Geoff back over to the man struggling to get away from his grasp. Before Geoff makes it over to Travis and Otto, he picks up the string of Christmas lights and then takes it over to the other two men. Otto, still pinning Travis down, grabs the lights from the taller man’s hand and begins to wrap the lights around the killer’s neck. “Stop!”, Travis attempts to yell, but is stopped by the tightening of the lights around his throat. Otto doesn’t say a single word and continues tightening the lights until Travis sees red, and nothing else. He tightens the lights until Travis stops fighting back, until his vision goes black, until his heart stops. Until he’s dead. Once Geoff and Otto confirm that Travis is dead, they exchange a glance. They know what they have to do next. Otto picks up the tooth bat and walks over to Travis’s car. Once he gets there, he raises the bat and smashes every single window of the vehicle in. Geoff picks up Travis’s limp body and places him in the passenger’s seat of the car. Then, the two men make their way across the parking lot over to Geoff’s car, not saying a word. Geoff opens the trunk and pulls out the swollen corpse of their lead singer. Otto opens the door to the back seat and grabs a can of gasoline and a pack of matches. The two men walk back over to Travis’s car and Geoff places the pruned man into the driver’s seat while Otto pours the gasoline around the perimeter of the vehicle. He then pours the remnants from the can on the inside of the vehicle. Geoff takes a few steps back from the scene. After Otto finishes pouring the fuel into the car’s interior, he takes a step back and looks at his friend, “Are you ready?” Geoff sighs and looks up from his feet, “As ready as I’ll ever be.” Otto strikes the match from the box he was still holding and drops it onto the driver’s side window as he runs away to prevent him from getting burned. When Otto makes it over to Geoff, they grasp hands and start to whisper in a language that nobody else can understand except for them and the entity that granted them the ability to perform this. They continue whispering until the flames engulf the entirety of the vehicle and until they start to smell the burning of the car and their friends. The two men then take a seat on the ground and watch the chaos of the flames building up and fluttering in the breeze. Despite the situation, the two of them found the flames calming, as they knew what was about to happen. Geoff and Otto sat in the parking lot until the late hours of the night, watching the car burn until the flames died down a bit on the exterior. That’s when the two felt a chilling breeze, even colder than the already winter air, cross their necks. Immediately after the sensation, they see the driver’s side door open and immediately crash onto the ground, creating a loud, startling, noise. Two feet in black boots swing out of the vehicle and take a step towards the two men sitting on the ground. Otto looks at Geoff with amusement and a look in his eyes of satisfaction. “Holy shit, Geoff,” he whispers, “It actually worked.” The man emerging from the car attempts to take another step towards the other two and immediately collapses onto the ground. Otto rushes over to him, carries the man over to Geoff, and lays him on the ground. Geoff, immediately wipes the soot from the man’s eyes to reveal the heterochromic irises they both knew and loved. The man lets out a cough and sits up weakly, “Feels good to be back.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!  
> This fic was written by:
> 
> Reese (@GLLTTERTLMES on twitter)
> 
> Monitored by:
> 
> Syd (@awstenphobic on twitter)  
> Hannah (@2IQUESTIONS on twitter)  
> Marley (@mystarryfriends on twitter)
> 
> Edited by:
> 
> Jenna (@afterhoursvinyl on twitter)


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